Alanna Okun Books in Order

If you want the essays first: The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater
If you want a beginner-friendly project book: Knit a Hat
If you want the fullest introduction to her work: The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater → Knit a Hat

Alanna Okun is a writer, editor, crafter, and game designer based in Brooklyn. She grew up in Boston, and her work has moved easily between publishing, internet culture, and the handmade world. Over the years she has written for outlets including The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, Vogue Knitting, and The Hairpin, and she has also appeared on national TV and radio.

Writing seems to have arrived early. Okun has said she was the kid who carried a tote bag full of books to school so she would never run out of something to read. She loved sharp, observant stories like Harriet the Spy, and that attention to the small details of everyday life stayed with her. In high school she wrote a column for the school paper, then kept at nonfiction through college and into her working life.

That instinct for observation became a career. Okun worked in digital media as both a writer and editor, including stints at BuzzFeed and Racked, and later helped lead service journalism at Vox. Her essays and reported pieces often circle the same questions that show up in her books: how people live now, what they make, what they long for, and how they try to build a little order out of chaos.

Craft came in early, too.

Okun learned to knit as a child, taught by her grandmother, and she has described one of her first solo projects as a ratty teal rectangle she was absurdly proud of. That detail tells you a lot about her work. She takes making seriously, but she does not treat it like sacred ritual that only experts can enter. The pleasure is in the trying, the fumbling, the jokes, and the small moment when a pile of yarn starts to become something real.

Her first book, The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater, came out in 2018. It uses crafting, especially knitting, as a way into bigger subjects: anxiety, grief, family, friendship, love, and the strange comfort of keeping your hands busy when the rest of life feels slippery. Readers who click with Okun usually respond to that mix of candor and humor. She is willing to be specific, even a little embarrassing, and she never loses sight of the fact that handmade things carry memory.

For Okun, craft is rarely just about the finished object.

That idea carries into Knit a Hat, published in 2020. Instead of writing a lofty ode to knitting, she builds a welcoming beginner's guide around one manageable project. A hat is small enough to finish, useful enough to feel worth the effort, and complicated enough to teach real skills. The tone matches the book's aim: friendly, clear, and encouraging without talking down to the reader.

Across her work, you can see a few steady interests. She writes about making things by hand, but also about control, uncertainty, identity, and the stories people tell themselves to get through the day. There is often a quiet, practical kind of comfort in her writing. Not false reassurance, just the reminder that doing one stitch, one sentence, one small task at a time can still amount to something.

In recent years, Okun's creative life has widened again. Alongside writing and textile work, she has moved into game design and creative technology, and she completed a master's degree at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2026. She still lives in Brooklyn, still makes things, and still seems drawn to the same basic question that runs through her books and career: what can we build, with our hands or our words, that helps life make a little more sense?